I find it fascinating that the drive hardware manages the filesystem. When did it become that the OS software managed the filesystem, and in the end, which is better?
It was cool however because there were tools that offloaded things to the drive CPU. You could also write programs for copying disk that you loaded into the RAM on the drive and then disconnected them from the computer. You used the drive lights to tell you when to swap the disk.
I think among early computers the C64 drive was somewhat of an exception; in some ways it's more like a NAS than a block device.